The subject matter described herein relates generally to the field of electronic devices and more particularly to systems and methods for drone localization.
In recent years, precise and low-latency indoor localization is becoming increasingly important in many application domains, such as indoor drone, sports, robotics and AR/VR. These applications typically require higher location update rate (e.g. >=10 Hz) and higher accuracy (e.g. error in centimeter) than traditional WiFi or GPS based location solutions. Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) radio based localization has a potential to achieve centimeter level location accuracy with lower hardware cost compared to cameras and LIDARs.
In principal, UWB localization utilizes radio signal time-of-flight measurement to estimate the distance between radios and then derive the location. In complex indoor environment, UWB radio signal can experience multipath (where the radio signal received includes direct line of sight signal as well as the reflected signals), obstructions (where there is no direct line of sight signal in received radio signal at all), and channel fading. Under those conditions, the timing measurements of the radio signal can be compromised, and the location accuracy can be degraded. Additionally, hardware measurement errors can also introduce additional errors. Without proper handling of these measurement errors, the UWB localization system can experience significantly degraded accuracy.
A typical localization system requires a number of fixed nodes (i.e., anchors) deployed in the field to serve as location references. The precise locations of those reference anchor nodes need to be known in order to track mobile nodes (e.g., tags) locations. Therefore, substantial deployment efforts are usually carried out in order to calibrate/measure the precise locations of each anchor nodes. Existing location tracking solution providers depend on such manual calibration of anchors nodes (e.g., using LIDAR or laser range finder). Such manual calibration process can take hours or days depending the size of the field. Additionally, such calibration has to be repeated if any anchor location is changed after the initialize setup. Such deployment efforts are non-trivial and present a serious road block for such location systems to be widely adopted by average consumers.
Accordingly, systems and methods to implement drone localization, e.g., in HD mapping for autonomous vehicles.